Recently, Roberto from Comalatech, the creators of Adhoc Workflows plugin for Confluence has also contributed a guest post too. In his post, he shared how people can use workflows to streamline the process of publishing Frequently Asked Questions into a knowledge base.

What a wiki cannot do

Being a Confluence wiki user for several years, I have experienced the following difficulties:

I have to email people after posting pages/comments to get their acknowledgement/approval/comments

I got difficulty tracking which pages/comments that I need to reply after a few days elapsed

There is a lot of extra work duplicated between the wiki and emails. And when people conveniently reply to the email instead of posting to the page. The collaboration and knowledge leaves the wiki back into the emails.

As such, I observed that a lot of wikis are mostly used for passive collaboration like knowledge bases, FAQs and intranets.

Almost every people hates writing documentation. It usually takes place only after everything is done where it is very difficult to recall all the tiny details. And it is likely that nobody else will read it since the person who wrote it has all the knowledge in their head. That’s why a lot of technical people dread writing documentations.

Sarah Maddox has given an very useful and interesting presentation with tips on making documentation more useful and engaging.

By increasing the engage-ability of the documentation, it increases the value of the documentation as

more people is likely to read the documentation

more people will be encouraged to contribute to the documentation

more people will be encouraged to keep it updated

more people will share their experiences too

A wiki helps to increase the engage-ability of the documentation by

making it easier to create documentation during the project rather than end of the project

making it easier to search (with a in-built search engine)

making it easier to share and link related information (with threaded comments on the same page)